Introduction

Our research project looks at the relationship between youth unemployment and youth political engagement. We are interested in learning whether being unemployed make young people more politically aware and involved, or does it make them care less about politics and withdraw from political activities?

Context

In the early 2000s, a global financial crisis slowly began to build, reaching a peak in 2008 and 2009. One of the most striking signs of this economic downturn was the increase in youth unemployment rates seen in many European countries. Nearly all European countries were affected, and many saw double-digit increases in their youth unemployment rates.

In this context, some powerful protest movements began to emerge that made the issue of unemployment – and especially youth unemployment – a main focus. Southern European countries, which were some of the hardest-hit by the financial crisis, gave birth to some of the most famous movements, like Podemos in Spain and Syriza in Greece (Syriza existed prior to the 2008 - 2009 crisis but its profile increased signficantly afterward).

In the below graph, you can compare youth unemployment rates for 22 different European countries to see just how much the numbers changed from 2008 to 2010. The values measured are the percent of the active population (i.e., individuals who are part of the labor force) that is unemployed.

Political Engagement Data

To look at the relationship between youth unemployment and youth political engagement, we relied on data from the European Social Survey, which is a representative survey of individuals in European countries that is conducted every two years, starting in 2002. Respondents are asked a variety of questions to guage their attitudes and perspectives on topics like politics, media, social issues, etc. Respondents are also asked a variety of demographic information, such as their age, sex, and employment status.

The below graph gives a window into one of the ESS measures of political engagement, which is an idividual’s level of political interest. This is measured on 1 to 4 scale, with 1 representing “very interested” in politics and 4 representing “not at all interested” in politics. The values in the graphs are the averages of the responses for all youths in a given country in a given year.

To get a better idea of how a young person’s level of political interest and their employment status are related, we did a simple regression to get estimates of the effect. The below chart looks at how the estimated level of political interest for a young person in Europe varies based on their education and their employment status.

In the below graph, a value of “0” (the red bars) means a person is employed. A value of “1” (the blue bars) means a person is unemployed.

The education levels on the bottom are arranged from least education to most education:

1 - Less than Secondary Education
2 -Lower Secondary Education
3 - Lower Tier Upper Secondary Education
4 - Upper Tier Upper Secondary Education
5 - Advanced Vocational Education
6 - BA Degree (or equivalent)
7 - MA Degree (or equivalent)

We can see from the graph that being unemployed does tend to lower your political interest (remember that with the 1 - 4 scale, a higher number means someone is less interested in politics) regardless of a person’s level of education.

Looking at a different measure of political engagement, we also looked at whether being unemployed makes you less likely to vote. As the below graph shows, the likelihood that a young person in Europe voted in the last election decreases if that person is also unemployed (with a value of 0 on the x-axis meaning an individual is employed, and a value of 1 on the x-axis meaning an individual is unemployed).

Conclusions

The effects we found in our regressions (as well as in the further regressions completed in our longer paper) are statistically significant, meaning we can say there is a real effect on both a young person’s political interest and their tendency to vote that is generated by being unemployed, and that this effect can’t be written away as random variation. Still, as seen in the above tables, the actual amount of change as a result of being unemployed is not huge. For that reason, we can’t say that that unemployment significantly impacts a young person’s level of political interest, but we can say that, based our data and analysis, it definitely has an effect.

Data Sources